Everyone was a kid once

Several weeks ago, I had to go to the DMV to get my truck registered in Missouri. Trips to the DMV are never fast, so I decided to people watch for a bit.

There was a very elderly gentleman who nearly stumbled out of his chair when he was called up to the counter.

A kind lady working at the counter had that Janis Joplin voice that comes with smoking Camels for an extended period of time.

A middle-aged man with a very short beard stared aloof at either the wall or the anti-trafficking and local hay advertisements on the DMV screen.

About two chairs down from me, a new mother gently bounced a very new baby girl on her knee.

Each one of them was a kid once. When he was a little boy, that old man probably recklessly hit trees with sticks like he was fighting a dragon, just like my boys do. The lady with the Janis Joplin voice probably liked getting spun around by her daddy in the front yard, just like my daughter does. It’s possible the middle aged man liked racing the other kids on the playground. And not that many years ago, that new mama was having tea parties with her dolls.

It's easy to take people at face value and peg them in the moment, but they weren't just plopped down onto planet earth salty with faded tattoos and asymmetrical gaits.

I told my wife about this realization, and she said "There's a word for that—sonder." Turns out that John Koenig, who maintains The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows coined a word for my experience (as well as dozens of other very human experiences not yet defined in the English dictionary):

sonder

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Everyone has a story. Everyone was once a kid once with kid hopes, kid dreams, and kid energy. Sometimes those hopes and dreams fade or are forgotten due to the time-waits-for-no-man forward movement of life. When I step back for a moment, this realization helps me see people more clearly, to relate to them not just as they are today, but as another human with a story just like mine. I think this realization should change how we treat people for the better.